Wormholes: not just for physicists anymore

A biologist investigates old illustrations to find new data about bugs.

New research published in Biology Letters last week presents evidence that wormholes can advance our knowledge by bridging gaps in time. But no, this isn't the cosmic, theoretical, Star Trek and Sliders kind of wormhole. This research is about holes made by worms and larvae. S. Blair Hedges, a biologist from Penn State University, used wormholes printed in art to examine the historical distribution of wood-boring insects in Europe.

Woodcut printing, which originated in Asia nearly 2,000 years ago, is an artistic way to print text and images. Words, characters, or pictures are carved in relief onto a block of wood, which is then inked and stamped onto paper. This art form was the major method of illustration in books for hundreds of years, from the invention of the printing press until the early 1800s.

Ingeniously, Hedges realized that wormholes embedded in the wood blocks were transferred onto the prints as white dots and tracks, and that these imperfections could be used to identify and track different species of insects throughout history.

Hedges used 473 wormhole-laden prints from across Europe, dated between 1462 and 1899. He identified two species that might have burrowed their way through these European wood blocks: Anobium punctatum, the “common furniture beetle," and Oligomerus ptilinoides, the "Mediterranean furniture beetle." The larvae of these species tend to attack dry hardwood, such as the apple, pear, and boxwood usually used to make the blocks for woodcut prints. Termites, along with many other European insects, prefer softer, drier wood. While these two beetle species now co-occur, there is little knowledge of their historical distribution across Europe.

There was a distinct difference between the wormholes in prints that originated in northern and southern Europe; prints from the north tended to have wormholes that were small and round, whereas southern prints had larger wormholes and were more likely to have “tracks” showing the actual burrows of the larvae. Based on the size and shape of these holes, Hedges determined that the northern wormholes were most likely made by the common furniture beetle, while the southern wormholes match those of its Mediterranean cousin.

Interestingly, the prints showed no evidence that these two species occurred together before the late 1800s; prints had holes made by either one or the other species, not both. It’s likely, therefore, that these two species had distinct geographical boundaries and only came into contact with each other in the last 100 years or so. Hedges suggests that local competition likely played a role in the species’ historical separation, and that the expansion of global trade in the early 20th century may have spread these beetles more widely and helped their ranges overlap.

This creative use of wormholes has much more information to offer; printed wormholes may be able to help researchers understand historical species invasions in other continents, such as Asia, and they could help track the origins of unknown works of woodcut art.

Kate Shaw Yoshida
Kate is a science writer for Ars Technica. She recently earned a dual Ph.D. in Zoology and Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior from Michigan State University, studying the social behavior of wild spotted hyenas. Emailkate.shaw@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KateYoshida

I'm gonna admit to being very disappointed by the first couple of paragraphs, but then I realised that this was actually a really interesting piece of research. Glad I fell for the link-bait

I'm of the opposite mind. Misleading headlines will always cause me to dislike the article, no matter the subject matter.

I don't know about that but it does seem to indicate a lack of confidence by the headline writer when they believe that people need to be tricked into reading the article. I also think it may indicate a lack of pride in their craft. Both are problems that experience cures.

Aw...an article about wormholes and bugs, and it involves neither (effectively) faster-than-light travel or computer code.

This actually makes me think of dendrochonology, the measuring of time based on tree rings.

You can find patterns in the rings of different age trees, match them up, and determine the relative age of the trees. If you know a date for one tree, you can often determine the dates of various events relative to each other that would be recorded in the rings (droughts, fires, etc). You can use this to help find an age for wood objects, buildings (ridge poles, for instance, are often the heartwood of a tree), etc. Like, if the ridgepole of a building matches the pattern for trees about 1200 years ago, but it's in an 800 year old building, there's a good chance there was another building there or nearby from which the wood was scavenged.

I'm gonna admit to being very disappointed by the first couple of paragraphs, but then I realised that this was actually a really interesting piece of research. Glad I fell for the link-bait

I'm of the opposite mind. Misleading headlines will always cause me to dislike the article, no matter the subject matter.

I don't know about that but it does seem to indicate a lack of confidence by the headline writer when they believe that people need to be tricked into reading the article. I also think it may indicate a lack of pride in their craft. Both are problems that experience cures.

I think you two are reading too much into the headlines. It's a pun, and Katie probably thought it was amusing.

Wasn't the subtitle ample indication that it was about insect burrowing rather than space wormholes or computer bugs? Or are those complaining using a view that does not display the subtitle?

Edit: Too often of late I would agree with Glitch's comment about seemingly gratuitous link-bait headlines which are unworthy of Ars, but in this case it was to me pretty obviously a joke, of the kind which traditionally matches Ars quite well (it's posted in what used to be called Nobel Intent, after all).

It's amazing that people are able to extract useful data from such accidental recordings. The ability to look at an illustration in an old book, notice some imperfections, and think "I wonder what I can learn about the world by studying these sorts of flaws" is one of the most impressive aspects of the scientific mindset, in my opinion. There's a lot of data all around us, hidden in plain sight, and it's good that some people are paying attention enough to notice it.

Also, regarding the headlines, I don't really see what people are complaining about. If you don't like the headlines, just ignore them and read the article. I tend to scan down the front page, opening articles in tabs as I go, and then read them all later. By the time I go to the tab to read the article, I've generally forgotten what the headline even was, and my brain just skips over it and goes right to the article. Whenever some "misleading headline" controversy erupts in the comments, I usually have to scroll back up to see what the headline even was. To me, headlines are a bit like advertisements, my brain just edits them out automatically.

An interesting bit of analysis. However, the fact that it's called the Mediterranean furniture beetle does rather strongly suggest that someone already was aware that it originated in Southern Europe.

The research wasn't done to determine the location of origin of the two different species of wood boring beetles. It was done to determine approximately when they started being present in overlapping regions.

Right now, both beetles are present in a similar geographic region in Europe. The theory was that this wasn't always the case. The researcher(s) used the wooden stamping blocks to determine when the beetles started showing up in the other beetles natural region of origin and to confirm that before that time they were generally isolated to their expected geographical origin (as you assert, the "common" variety originated from northern Europe while the aptly named "Mediterranean" variety originated from southern Europe (Near the..... wait for it.... wait for it.... Mediterranean.)).